“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”
(John 8:36)

Free Indeed

William Marrion Branham (April 6, 1909 December 24, 1965) was a Christian minister, usually credited with founding the post World War II divine healing movement. Some considered him to be a prophet. According to David Harrell, "Branham's healing power became a world-wide legend".

He believed Christians needed to return to the original apostolic faith of the Bible.

+++

The Doctrine of the Nicolaitanes

by Rev. William Marrion Branham

Revelation 2:15, "So hast thou also them that hold the doctrine of the Nicolaitanes, which thing I hate."

You will recall that I brought out in the Ephesian Age that the word, Nicolaitane, comes from two Greek words: Nikao which means to conquer, and Lao which means the laity. Nicolaitane means, "to conquer the laity." Now why is this such a terrible thing? It is terrible because God has never placed His church in the hands of an elected leadership which moves with political mindedness. He has placed His church in the care of God- ordained, Spirit-filled, Word-living men who lead the people through feeding them the Word. He has not separated the people into classes so that the masses are led by a holy priesthood. It is true that the leadership must be holy, but then so must be the whole congregation. Further, there is no place in the Word where priests or ministers or such mediate between God and the people, nor is there a place where they are separated in their worship of the Lord. God wants all to love and serve Him together. Nicolaitanism destroys those precepts and instead separates the ministers from the people and makes the leaders overlords instead of servants. Now this doctrine actually started as a deed in the first age. It appears that the problem lay in two words: "elders" (presbyters) and "overseers" (bishops). Though Scripture shows that there are several elders in each church, some began (Ignatius among them) to teach that the idea of a bishop was one of preeminence or authority and control over the elders. Now the truth of the matter is the word "elder" signifies who the person is, while the word "bishop" signifies the office of the same man. The elder is the man. Bishop is the office of the man. "Elder" always has and always will refer simply to a man's chronological age in the Lord. He is an elder, not because he is elected or ordained, etc., but because he IS OLDER. He is more seasoned, trained, not a novice, reliable because of experience and long standing proof of his Christian experience. But no, the bishops did not stick to the epistles of Paul, but rather they went to Paul's account of the time he called the elders from Ephesus to Miletus in Acts 20. In verse 17 the record states, "elders" were called and then in verse 28 they are called overseers (bishops). And these bishops, (no doubt political minded and anxious for power) insisted that Paul had given the meaning that "overseers" were more than the local elder with official capacity only in his own church. To them a bishop was now one with extended authority over many local leaders. Such a concept was neither Scriptural nor historical, yet even a man of the stature of Polycarp leaned toward such organization. Thus, that which started as a deed in the first age was made a literal doctrine and so it is today. Bishops still claim power to control men and deal with them as they desire, placing them where they so will in the ministry. This denies the leadership of the Holy Ghost Who said, "Separate Me Paul and Barnabas for the work whereunto I have called them." This is anti-Word and anti-Christ. Matthew 20:25-28, "But Jesus called them unto Him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you; but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many." Matthew 23:8- 9, "But be not ye called Rabbi: for One is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. And call no man your father upon the earth: for One is your Father, Which is in heaven."

***

Interfax

Russia will defend national identity, based on religious values – Putin

September 20, 2013

People will lose their human dignity without values enshrined in Christianity and other world religions, without moral standards that have taken millennia to take shape, President Vladimir Putin has said.

“We believe that it is natural and appropriate to defend those values. Any minority deserves respect for its distinctive identity, but the rights of the majority must not be questioned,” Putin said during a meeting of theValdai discussion club.

He believes, that Russia can’t move forward without cultural and national self-determination. Otherwise the country won’t be able to respond to external or internal challenges, can’t be successful in global competition.

“Events that take place in the world represent one more serious challenge to the Russian identity. There are foreign policy and moral aspects to this. We have been able to see many Euro-Atlantic countries effectively embark on a path of renouncing their roots, including Christian values, which underlie Western civilization,” Putin said.

“That involves the negation of moral principles and any traditional identity – national, cultural, religious, or even sexual,” he said.

“Policies are pursued that put large families and same-sex partnerships in the same category, belief in God and belief in Satan. Excesses of political correctness reach the point where there are serious discussions on the registration of parties that have propaganda of pedophilia as their objective. People in many European countries are ashamed and afraid of speaking about their religion, holidays are abolished or given other names, names that shyly conceal the nature of those holidays, and aggressive attempts are made to force this model on the rest of the world,” Putin said.

“This is a direct path to degradation and primitiveness, to deep demographic and moral crises,” he said.

“What can be a better indication of a moral crisis in human society than its loss of the ability for self-reproduction?” Putin said.

***

The Telegraph

The rabbi, the lost ark and the future of Temple Mount

In Jerusalem, rabbis are designing a new hi-tech temple. There's only one problem: they want to build it on the holiest place in the city for Muslims

Palestinian Muslim men pray in front of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem Photo: Getty

By Jake Wallis Simons

12 Sep 2013

Rabbi Chaim Richman shows me into a darkened room, strokes his beard and pulls out his smartphone. He has a specially designed app that works the lights. The room illuminates. He taps the screen again, and a heavy curtain slides open. There, resplendent in brilliant gold – and rather smaller than I expected – lies the Ark of the Covenant.

“This isn’t the real lost ark,” he says. “The real one is hidden about a kilometre from here, in underground chambers created during the time of Solomon.” I look at him askance. “It’s true,” he says. “Jews have an unbroken chain of recorded information, passed down from generation to generation, which indicates its exact location. There is a big fascination with finding the lost ark, but nobody asked a Jew. We have known where it is for thousands of years. It could be reached if we excavated Temple Mount, but that area is controlled by Muslims.”

Welcome to the Temple Institute exhibition, in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem. A plush, hi-tech gallery, spanning 600 sq ft, it hosts a collection of vestments and sacred vessels to be used by the Jewish high priest. This is not a museum, insists Rabbi Richman, 54, the international director of the organisation. Apart from the Ark of the Covenant, every artefact on display has been painstakingly created in accordance with Biblical instructions and is intended for actual service in a “third Jewish temple", which will be built as soon as possible.

Central to the collection is a high priest’s costume made out of azure and gold thread with a breastplate featuring 12 large gems. Cost: £160,000. There are also intricate silver trumpets and wooden lyres, pans to collect the blood of the sacrificial lamb and a large stand for the ritual bread. Outside, on a platform overlooking the Western Wall, stands an ornate 1.5-ton candelabra covered in 90kg of gold worth £1.3 million.

All have been designed in consultation with 20 full-time Talmudic scholars, who the institute pays to study the elaborate, 2,000-year-old laws governing the construction of temple artefacts. But, before you accuse Richman and his colleagues of being old-fashioned, the Temple Institute has drawn up plans for the new temple that include two very contemporary features: a monorail, to transport visitors right to the door, and a 6ft-high computerised water dispenser with 12 taps so that an entire shift of priests can wash their hands at once. This, Richman tells me, has been designed so that a twist of the tap will release the precise amount of water stipulated in Jewish law.

“There is no reason why we shouldn’t use technology, which is the modern miracle, alongside the heavenly miracles,” the rabbi tells me. “It’s part of our vision of [the temple] as a realistic potential in our times. I’m sure it will have elevators, underfloor heating and a car park.”

This may sound fanciful, but in the febrile atmosphere of Jerusalem – a holy city for three world religions – Richman’s ideas are highly inflammatory. The proposed location of the new temple is the Temple Mount (or Haram al-Sharif in Arabic), one of the most disputed places on the planet. The First Temple, built by King Solomon 3,000 years ago, stood on this site, says Richman, and the Third Temple must be erected in the same place. Unfortunately, the area is already occupied – by an Islamic shrine known as the Dome of the Rock, the shimmering gold roof that dominates the Jerusalem skyline, and the Al-Aqsa mosque, the third holiest place in the world for Muslims.

Many Palestinians fear that Israeli extremists are plotting to destroy both and with a certain amount of justification; in 1984, a plot to blow up the Dome of the Rock by a group called the Jewish Underground was uncovered by police. Other Palestinians believe the threat comes from the Israeli government itself. In 2000, the then Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, visited the site to underline Israel’s control over the area, a move that sparked the second intifada, during which 1,000 Israelis and 3,000 Palestinians died. And recently, a string of religious and political figures, including Richman, have asserted the right of Jews to pray on Temple Mount, a request that – if granted – would lead to violent clashes, say Palestinian leaders, and provide Israel with an excuse to place the area under military control.

Rabbi Chaim Richman on the Temple Mount

“The Israeli strategy is to take it over,” says Mahdi Abdul Hadi, chairman of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs. “We don’t want to share, not because we don’t accept them, but because we don’t trust them.” The Palestinian Authority has been even more forthright. “[The Jewish desire for the area is] totally unacceptable, and could transform the region into a powder keg,” said president Mahmoud Abbas in May. Sheikh Mohamad Hussein, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, agreed. “Muslims in Palestine and elsewhere will never accept this provocation and will try to thwart it by all means necessary,” he said. “This is the ultimate red line for us. The Israelis and the world should listen carefully to what I am saying.”

Overall, Richman’s institute has spent more than $30 million – thanks mostly to donations from private Jewish philanthropists – and upgraded to its new hi-tech gallery in May after 22 years in a smaller premises down the road. And, although its exhibits are only open to the public by appointment, it is by no means short of punters: a million people have visited over the past 12 years.

Nevertheless, even among the religious Jewish community there are those who view Richman and the Temple Institute with suspicion. Michael Melchior, an Orthodox rabbi and former member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, refers to the organisation as “irresponsible”.

“We pray for holiness, but we also need to be careful of others’ desire for holiness,” he told the Jewish Post newspaper. “The moment you want to translate that into building a temple, you upset the sensitive balance we’ve created here, by which we exist.” Richman refutes such claims, pointing out that he isn’t calling for the destruction of either the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aqsa mosque; he is simply asserting that it is a central Jewish obligation to prepare for the rebuilding of the temple. Nevertheless, his continual trips to the disputed area, along with other Jewish activists, have generated huge resentment and the rabbi has been arrested by Israeli police many times – sometimes for “weeks on end”.

Today, he is making yet another visit. As the heat of the day approaches, Richman takes me up a rickety wooden ramp and onto Temple Mount, protected by an armed police escort. The atmosphere is tranquil, even ethereal. Palestinians are strolling across the forecourt, milling around the entrance to the Muslim shrine, and relaxing in the shade. Yet as soon as the rabbi is spotted cries of “Allahu akbar” ring out. Our policeman adjusts his weapon and directs us into a less conspicuous corner. Shadowing our small party is a representative of the Waqf, the Islamic trust that administers the Temple Mount. His job is to make sure that the rabbi does not attempt to pray.

From Richman’s point of view, this is a complete infringement of his constitutional rights. The Temple Mount is believed to be the site of the Foundation Stone, the Holy of Holies, from where God gathered the dust to create Adam. But ever since the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in AD70, Jewish entry has either been banned or severely restricted by Christian and Islamic rulers. Even after Israel captured East Jerusalem in 1967, the area was considered so sensitive that Palestinians were allowed to retain day-to-day control.

A model of the proposed Third Temple on display at the Temple Institute

“Jews believe that even mentioning a sick person’s name in this place is an amazing thing for healing,” says Richman. “Yet I am not allowed to pray, in the holiest place of my own homeland. So I have to do things like this.” He breaks abruptly into mumbled Hebrew liturgy, gesticulating with his arms as if continuing the conversation. The Waqf man eyes him suspiciously, and the Israeli policeman eyes him in turn. (Other visitors have been even more overt – singing and lying on the ground to pray.)

For these reasons, the rabbi refers to himself as a “displaced person”. Contrasted with the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and the continued Israeli presence on the West Bank, this could be perceived as, well, a bit rich.

“That’s just a distraction,” he says. “This is about God’s territory. Islam took advantage of our exile and began to squat on Temple Mount and deny that Jews were ever here. We have a birthright to this place, and I don’t see why we should be embarrassed about it.” Although the rabbi expresses his views with certainty, many of his facts are disputed. There is no agreement, for example, about the location of the Ark of the Covenant. Shimon Gibson, a biblical archaeologist at the Albright Institute in Jerusalem, believes that when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem in 587 BC, they removed the gold from the ark and burned the wooden frame along with the rest of the wood from the temple. Other scholars believe it was taken to Africa.

There is also precious little archaeological evidence for the location of the First Temple, although the location of the Second Temple, built in 516 BC, is more certain. Razed by the Romans, one wall of the courtyard that surrounded the temple – the Western Wall – remains and has become a focus of Jewish prayer.

I ask Richman whether his plans involve the demolition of the Dome of the Rock. He pauses. “I don’t like to speculate about highly sensitive matters,” he says. “But there is only one place where the temple will be built, and it is where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque are currently standing.” This sounds like a veiled ambition for war, especially against the backdrop of new peace negotiations when extremists on both sides feel threatened and are in volatile mood. “That’s not what I meant,” says Richman. “A prophecy indicates that one day, the Islamic world will accept the idea of a Jewish temple here, become harmonious and usher us in.” Another miracle, I ask? “Right.”

This may seem like the words of a zealot. But although much mainstream public opinion believes Richman and his associates to be troublemakers, such is the potent mixture of religion, culture and politics in the Holy Land that a sizeable portion of Israeli right-wing opinion is sympathetic to his position.

Jewish visits to the Temple Mount plaza rose 30 per cent in 2012, according to estimates by Jewish worshipper groups, due, partly, to the fact that several scholars have identified specific areas of holiness on the plaza. (According to tradition, it is sacrilege for a Jew to set foot on the spot where the Holy of Holies stood, but some areas of the Temple Mount have now been deemed “safe” to walk on.)

The issue began to be framed as a campaign for religious equality and a time-sharing scheme was proposed, allocating certain hours for Jewish worship, in a similar way to a scheme already in existence at Hebron’s Cave of the Patriarchs, also a holy site for both Muslims and Jews. Arieh Eldad, a right-wing politician who proposed this plan, accused Palestinians of using the threat of violence to keep the plaza to themselves. The Israeli Supreme Court then upheld the right of Jews to pray on the plaza, but only if such action did not incite “a disturbance to public order” (which the Waqf says is what Rabbi Richman’s praying does). Following this logic, the Mount was closed to non-Muslim visitors during Ramadan in July and August.

Right-wing Jewish group The Temple Mount Faithful stage a protest during a visit by the Pope

Moshe Feiglin, a member of parliament for the ruling Likud party, registered his anger by staging a protest visit. “I call for everyone who hears us to come here, to understand that they are giving the very heart of Jerusalem to foreigners, to Islam,” he told Israeli media. “We need to understand that there needs to be sacrifice here, that 1,000 people show up ready to make sacrifices, ready to be arrested”. His clarion call was not answered in quite these numbers, but scores did come and protested in silent prayer outside the locked Temple Mount gate before dispersing.

Richman, for his part, says he is no longer looking to get arrested. “It’s not that I’ve lost my fire,” he says. “It’s just that at the age of 54, I want to see my children at night.”

The rest of our tour of Temple Mount is conducted in a stop-start rhythm, dictated by the nervy policeman. The rabbi is mainly concerned with showing me how in his view, Palestinian “temple deniers” have attempted to destroy all evidence of the Israelite temple, in an effort to undermine the Jewish claim to this place. There, he says: a broken marble pillar. There, a collection of discarded cedar beams. There, the remains of a staircase.

“We are ready to restore this place to its former glory,” says Richman. “And we have priests who are ready to serve in the Third Temple. That would be a much smaller miracle than the establishment of the state of Israel. Here we are, in our homeland, and we have the power to build the temple whenever we want! God must be wondering what we are waiting for.”

***

CNN

Why everyone fights over Jerusalem

]

World-renowned chef, best-selling author and Emmy-winning television personality Anthony Bourdain returns for the second season of CNN's showcase for coverage of food and travel. "Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown" is shot entirely on location and premieres Sept 15 @ 9pm ET/PT. Follow the show on Twitter and Facebook. Bourdain's first stop: Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

By Daniel Burke

(CNN) - Heaven and Earth are said to meet atop Jerusalem’s sacred mounts, but the city’s stony streets have seen more than their share of hellish violence.

King David subdued the Jebusites, the city's Canaanite founders. The Babylonians and Romans routed the Jews. Muslims booted the Byzantines. Christian Crusaders mauled Muslims and were, in turn, tossed out by the Tartars.

The Ottomans followed, then Britain, then Jordan, before finally, in 1967, the city came nearly full circle when Israel annexed East Jerusalem. That sparked another cycle of violence, this time between Israelis and Palestinians.

“It’s easily the most contentious piece of real estate in the world,” says Anthony Bourdain, who visits Jerusalem in the season premiere of “Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown,” which debuts Sunday night on CNN.

“And there’s no hope - none - of ever talking about it without pissing someone off.”

Why would people argue about a holy place?

You might call it the Jerusalem Paradox: If the city wasn't considered so sacred, there'd be nothing to fight about.

But since the days of the Jebusites, more than 3,000 years ago, the otherwise unremarkable place has been called a portal to paradise, and everyone elbows for a closer look.

After all, how many places can list God on their guest registry? And Abraham, David, Solomon, the Virgin Mary, Jesus and the Prophet Mohammed as well.

“The city is chockablock full of places that have historical meaning for different groups of people - and they are all contested,” said Samuel Heilman, a professor of Jewish Studies at Queens College in New York and author of “A Walker in Jerusalem.”

“Everybody’s story is just one of many,” Heilman said. “And so they not only try to make their story the right story, they try to delegitimize everyone else’s.”

Some Muslims say Jerusalem never housed a Jewish temple; some Jews argue that Mohammed never visited the sacred city, and the argument runs on and on … for centuries.

And it’s not just Muslims, Christians and Jews fighting each other. Sometimes the most serious squabbles erupt within the faith themselves. Want to see Christian monks fist-fight? Go to Jerusalem.

The good news is, all three Abrahamic faiths teach that the Messiah will eventually return to Jerusalem and sort the whole thing out.

Until then, here are the sacred city’s five most contested sites:

1. The Temple Mount

This broad platform in Jerusalem’s Old City is said to have hosted an almost unimaginable series of sacred events.

The rabbinic sages say that God gathered dust from this spot to create Adam, the first man, before setting him loose in the Garden of Eden.

Jewish tradition holds that the Temple Mount also contains Mount Moriah, where Abraham, the Hebrew patriarch, is said to have nearly sacrificed his son - under God’s orders - before an angel intervened.

Later, Solomon constructed the first Jewish Temple on the mount, including the Holy of Holies, a room that kept the Ark of the Covenant, which was said to contain the tablets on which God wrote the Ten Commandments.

Only the Jewish high priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, where tradition holds he met with God on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Rabbis say that Jews are still forbidden to step on the Temple Mount, for fear of intruding on the Holy of Holies.

The Temple was destroyed twice, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. Religious Jews pray the Third Temple will be built by the Messiah himself.

Since 1967, the Temple Mount has been an almost constant source of tension because it is also home to the …

2. Haram al-Sharif

Muslims call the Temple Mount "Haram al-Sharif" (the Noble Sanctuary), and it's home to one of the most sacred sites in Islam: the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Muslims believe that the Prophet Mohammed was carried on a flying steed from Mecca to al-Aqsa during his miraculous Night Journey, said Muqtedar Khan, an expert on Islam and politics at the University of Delaware.

“It’s al about al-Aqsa,” said Khan. “That’s why all Muslims are sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.”

According to Islamic tradition, the night journey took Mohammed to the same Jerusalem rock on which Abraham nearly sacrificed his son, where the Muslim founder led Abraham, Moses and Jesus in prayers as the last of God's prophets.

That rock is now said to sit in the Dome of the Rock, whose golden roof gleams above the Old City skyline.

Since it's construction in the seventh century, the Haram al-Sharif, now controlled by an Islamic trust, has been an almost constant source of tension between Muslims and Jews.

In the 1980s, Jewish radicals plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa, believing that it would lead to a spiritual revolution and usher in the messiah.

In 2000, the Second Intifada – a five-year-long Palestinian uprising - was sparked, Palestinians say, after Ariel Sharon, then a candidate for Israeli Prime Minister, visited the compound surrounding al-Aqsa.

Sharon insisted that his visit was not intended to provoke Palestinians, but many saw it as an attempt to underline Israel’s claim to Jerusalem’s holy sites.

3. The Western Wall

Israeli soldiers wept when they saw the Western Wall in 1967, after seizing East Jerusalem from Jordan.

“We have returned to our most holy places,” said one Israeli general. “We have returned and we shall never leave them.”

Located at the foot of the Temple Mount, the 62-foot-tall stone wall once supported the courtyard of the ancient temple, the center of Jewish spiritual life for centuries.

For Jews, the wall is one of the last remaining links to that time, and they gather before it to hold religious services, to pray or to slip notes into its cracks.

“There's a tradition that notes put in the wall are like notes transmitted to heaven,” Heilman said, “since this is as close as Jews were able for generations to get to the Temple Mount where they believed God dwelt on earth.”

How close Jews get - and which kind of Jews - has been a subject of fierce debate in recent years.

The praying area is divided into men’s and women’s sections, and ultra-Orthodox men have hurled chairs at women who sing and pray at the wall or try to enter the men’s section, accusing them of violating Jewish law.

In response, a group called Women of the Wall has launched a highly publicized protest campaign to win the right to wear prayer shawls, lead prayers and read collectively from the Torah at the holy site.

4. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

In the fourth century, after converting to Christianity, Emperor Constantine launched what historian Karen Armstrong calls “one of the first recorded archaeological excavations in history.”

He was looking for Jesus’ tomb and thought he found it in Jerusalem. Constantine asked his mother to oversee the construction of a magnificent church on the site.

Originally called the Church of Resurrection, it was destroyed by a Muslim caliph in 1009, but later Muslim leaders allowed Christians to rebuild the church.

Now called the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it is believed by many Christians to house a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified, his tomb and the site of his resurrection.

Under a centuries-old agreement, the church is shared by six Christian communities, but they squabble over every stone, sometimes coming to blows over perceived slights.

In 2008, for example, Israeli riot police broke up a melee between Greek Orthodox and Armenian monks. Ethiopian monks reportedly sneaked into the church's rooftop monastery during Easter prayers in 1970 and changed the locks, evicting the its former owners, the Copts.

The six Christian communities at the Holy Sepulcher don’t even trust each other with the church keys. A Muslim family has held them, opening the church every morning and closing it every night since the 12th century.

5. The Garden Tomb

Not all Christians believe that Jesus was buried and rose again at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

In the 19th century, doubts crept in about Constantine’s site, said Robert Wilken, a professor of Christian history at the University of Virginia.

“What it really boils down to is that Protestants came to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the 19th century and were appalled that it was an Orthodox church,” Wilken said. The icons and incense were apparently too much for Protestants more austere sensibilities.

In 1867, British Christians unearthed what they believe was the garden of Joseph of Arimathea, outside the Old City's Damascus Gate, where they believe Jesus was entombed.

The Gospel of John says that Jesus' tomb was near a garden, and the British Christians who run the Garden Tomb say their site matches the Bible’s descriptions perfectly.

The tomb is carved from solid rock, it sits near an escarpment that looks like a skull (Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, means “place of the skull,”) and most importantly, they say, the tomb is empty, signifying a resurrected Jesus.

So, is there any chance the battle for Jerusalem will end before the End Times?

Muqtedar Khan says yes, if the traditions that trace their history to Abraham - Jews, Muslims and Christians - start seeing themselves as part of the same sacred lineage, rather than three separate religions.

"If there were willing to share this identity," Khan said, "perhaps they'd be more willing to share Jerusalem."

Arutz Sheva

Op-Ed: The Pope Separates Jews from Israelis

Published: Friday, September 13, 2013 10:06 AM

One of the grave dangers in the Vatican's dialogue with Judaism is the Church's attempt to drive a wedge between the “good” and docile Jews of the Diaspora and the “bad” and arrogant Jews of Israel.

Giulio Meotti

The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.

Pope Francis has praised Jews for keeping their faith despite the Holocaust and other “terrible trials” throughout history, and reaffirmed Judaism as the “holy root” of Christianity.

In a letter, published on the front page of La Repubblica Italian newspaper, the Pope writes that "since Vatican Council II, we have rediscovered that the Jewish people are still for us the holy root from which Jesus germinated".

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio had celebrated Rosh Hashana in local synagogues, he had voiced solidarity with Jewish victims of Iranian terrorism and co-written a book with a rabbi, Avraham Skorka. He attended a commemoration of Kristallnacht, the wave of Nazi attacks against Jews in November 1938.

But as this new letter shows, one of the grave dangers in the Vatican's dialogue with Judaism is the Church's attempt to drive a wedge between the “good” and docile Jews of the Diaspora and the “bad” and arrogant Jews of Israel.

Pope Francis has never addressed the Israelis in his messages, nor has he openly defended the Jewish State since he was elected by the college of the cardinals. It seems that there is no room for stubborn, faithful Zionists in the Pope's lenient smile. In his speeches, Jewish national aspirations are ignored, if not denigrated.

The definitive proof is in Washington.

While the Pope was distributing that letter, in a new event co-sponsored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Catholic University of America was hosting a special conference about “religious freedom and human rights issues in the Holy Land”. The speakers included Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., Jessica Montell, executive director of B’Tselem anti-Israel group, and Mustafa Barghouti, the prominent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

Cardinal McCarrick said that “the expansion of Israeli settlements into occupied territories provokes violence”, in a self-evident justification of Arab terrorism. Montell, who accepted money from BDS, added that “settlement expansion is a primary source of human rights violations for Palestinians” and that “human rights violations are inherent to a prolonged military occupation”.

"When you live under occupation, you come to accept things you shouldn't accept,” Lubna Alzaroo, a Muslim graduate of Bethlehem University and Fullbright scholar studying at the University of Washington, said at the D.C. event of the Catholic Church.

Among the organizations invited by the Catholic bishops there was also the Society of St. Yves, which charges "Israeli colonization, occupation and apartheid" and works for "the Palestinian refugees’ rights to return to their homes and places of origin". The Society of St. Yves shares also the "Nakba” ideology, the “catastrophe”, as the Arabs call the date of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

While the Pope was penning his letter about Jesus, the US' highest Catholic political body was giving a platform to the boycotters of Israel, it was calling for the indefensible-for-Israel partition of the holy land and it was exculpating the Palestinian Arab for their jihad.

The Vatican, as always happened in the past, will be silent during the next "terrible trials" for the Jewish people, if they occur, should it be Iranian nuclear or Arab terrorism.

When Pope Francis was elected, a media outlet asked me to comment. My reply was: "I hope the next Pope will avoid the ecumenical mistakes of his predecessors, he will address the challenge of political Islam and understand the Jewish revolution of returning to the land after Auschwitz. Otherwise, any Jewish-Catholic dialogue will be empty, or worse, it will be a show for hypocrites".

Was I right to be skeptical?

WND

NO JOKE THIS TIME: IS THE POPE CATHOLIC?

Current bishop of Rome sets out to shake up Church

JEROME R. CORSI

NEW YORK – “Is the pope Catholic?” goes the quip most Catholic faithful thought they would never ask … at least not seriously.

But with a series of recent pronouncements and decisions bucking papal tradition, Pope Francis has many Catholics wondering if the Catholic Church will survive his papacy.

In recent days, the Pope has declared that non-believers – not just non-Catholics, but even atheists – can gain salvation and be admitted into heaven, while his new appointment to be secretary of State, the second most important position in the Vatican, has suggested the Vatican is ready to rethink celibacy and the clergy, suggesting priests and nuns might be allowed to get married.

Now, Catholic faithful are asking, “Will the Catholic Church survive Pope Francis’ papacy?”

Is homosexuality a sin?

The shock to traditional Catholic thinking began when Pope Francis decided to go to the back of the airplane and give an interview to news reporters on the return home from Brazil on his first international trip as pope.

Instead of saying that homosexuality is “an intrinsic moral evil,” as did his predecessor Benedict XVI, Francis responded to a reporter’s question, “If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

Can atheists be saved?

Then, on Sept. 11, in a letter published on the front page of the Rome-based newspaper La Repubblica, Pope Francis answered a question posed by the paper’s founder and long-time editor, the 89 year-old Eugenio Scalfari, who asked whether God would forgive someone who lacked faith for having committed a sin.

The pope’s answer suggested that not only does God not require belief in Jesus for salvation, but God does not even require belief in God.

Specifically, the pope wrote: “So, I come to the three questions you put to me in your article of Aug. 7. It seems to me that, in the first two, what is in your heart is to understand the attitude of the Church to those who don’t share faith in Jesus. First of all, you ask me if the God of Christians forgives one who doesn’t believe and doesn’t seek the faith. Premise that – and it’s the fundamental thing – the mercy of God has no limits if one turns to him with a sincere and contrite heart; the question for one who doesn’t believe in God lies in obeying one’s conscience. Sin, also for those who don’t have faith, exists when one goes against one’s conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.”

Must Jews accept Jesus?

In the same letter, Pope Francis reached out to Jews, continuing a theme he has made famous in Argentina since the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires killed 85 people and wounded hundreds more.

Pope Francis stressed that the Jewish people are the “root” from which Jesus germinated.

“In the friendship I cultivated in the course of all these years with Jewish brothers in Argentina, often in prayer I also questioned God when my mind went to the memory of the terrible experience of the Holocaust,” Pope Francis wrote. “What I can say to you, with the Apostle Paul, is that God’s fidelity to the close covenant with Israel never failed and that, through the terrible trials of these centuries, the Jews have kept their faith in God.”

Pope Francis on the occasion of Rash Hashanah wished Jews a Happy New Year and encouraged an open dialogue on questions of faith.

Still, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist writing an op-ed piece in the Israeli National News was not satisfied.

“But as this new letter shows, one of the grave dangers in the Vatican’s dialogue with Judaism is the Church’s attempt to drive a wedge between the ‘good’ and docile Jews of the Diaspora and the ‘bad’ and arrogant Jews of Israel,” Meotti wrote. “Pope Francis has never addressed the Israelis in his messages, nor has he openly defended the Jewish State since he was elected by the College of Cardinals. It seems that there is no room for stubborn, faithful Zionists in the pope’s lenient smile. In his speeches, Jewish national aspirations are ignored, if not denigrated.”

Meotti referenced a letter the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops distributed recently in conjunction with the Catholic University of America that condemned the expansion of Israeli settlements, arguing that settlement expansion “is a primary source of human rights violations for Palestinians,” suggesting that Palestinians living in Israel are living under “a prolonged military occupation” by Israeli Jews.

Can priests and nuns marry?

While Pope Benedict XVI forbade any open dialogue on whether or not priests and nuns should be allowed to marry, Pope Francis, who famously said priestly celibacy could change, may be about to put the subject on the table for serious debate and discussion.

So says Clelia Luro, an 87-year-old woman whose romance and eventual marriage with a bishop became a major scandal in the 1960s, but did not deter Pope Francis from being her strong friend, who telephoned her every Sunday when he was Argentina’s leading cardinal, as reported by Fox News.

That prediction appears to be coming true after Italian Archbishop Pietro Parolin, the apostolic nuncio from Venezuela who was recently appointed to be papal secretary of State, the Vatican’s second-in-command, told Venezuela’s El Universal newspaper that celibacy for the clergy is not dogma.

Translated out of formal Catholic Church terminology, with this pronouncement Archbishop Parolin was signaling that celibacy for the clergy was not a required article of faith in which all practicing Catholics must believe, but a practice or tradition that should be open to debate.

***

WND

ARCHAEOLOGISTS: BIBLE TOWN POSSIBLY FOUND

Is this where Jesus went after feeding 4,000?

JOE KOVACS

This Sea of Galilee boat is the most famous artifact associated with a newly discovered town that Jesus may have sailed to in the first century.

Archaeologists say they’ve discovered an ancient town mentioned in the New Testament, and it could be the location to which Jesus sailed after miraculously feeding some 4,000 people by multiplying a few fish and loaves of bread.

Ken Dark of the University of Reading in the U.K. says the town may be Dalmanutha, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

According to LiveScience, Dark’s team of archaeologists “also determined that a famous boat, dating to around 2,000 years ago, and uncovered in 1986, was found on the shoreline of the newly discovered town. The boat was reported on two decades ago but the discovery of the town provides new information on what lay close to it.”

Dalmanutha is mentioned in the Gospel of Mark right after the feeding miracle, stating: “The people ate and were satisfied. Afterward the disciples picked up seven basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over. About four thousand were present. After he had sent them away, he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the region of Dalmanutha.” (Mark 8:8-8:10, New International Version)

While Dalmanutha is only specified by name in Mark’s Gospel, a corresponding passage in Matthew 15:39 says, “And he sent away the multitude, and took ship, and came into the coasts of Magdala.”

The 2,000-year-old boat which was found on the shoreline back in 1986 is to date is the most famous artifact from the area.

“Vessel glass and amphora hint at wealth,” wrote Dark in the most recent edition of Palestine Exploration Quarterly, and “eights and stone anchors, along with the access to beaches suitable for landing boats – and, of course, the first-century boat … all imply an involvement with fishing.”

Dark’s team says their finding indicate the town was prosperous, and probably survived for many centuries.

They found that fields between the modern-day town of Migdal and the sea coast contained hundreds of pottery pieces dating from as early as the second or first century B.C. to up to some point after the fifth century A.D., the time of the Byzantine Empire.

Also among their finds were cubes known as tesserae and limestone vessel fragments, which were “associated with Jewish purity practices in the early Roman period,” indicating the presence of a Jewish community in the town, Dark told LiveScience.

“Some of the most impressive finds, however, were not made in the fields but rather in modern-day Migdal itself,” said LiveScience. “The archaeologists found dozens of examples of ancient architectural remains, some of which the modern-day townspeople had turned into seats or garden ornaments, or simply left lying on the ground. In one instance, the researchers found more than 40 basalt ashlar blocks in a single garden.

“After talking to the local people, and trying to identify the source and date of the findings, the researchers determined that many of the architectural remains came from the local area and likely were part of this newly discovered town.”

***

RaidersNewsNetwork Exclusive

Hacked, Attacked, And Burned To The Ground!

Are 'Forces' Trying To Silence Researcher?

Posted: September 15, 2013


On January 4, 2011, Tom Horn had spent the day preparing to leave for Oklahoma City where he and Gary Stearman were planning to record a show on 'transhumanism' for the syndicated Prophecy in the News television ministry (transhumanism is a growing intellectual and cultural movement that envisions the use of new sciences such as genetic modification to enhance normal humans with the goal of eventually transforming mankind to 'posthuman').

Before he could get out the door, Tom heard a series of "pops", which at first sounded like small firecrackers going off in unison. Listening closer, Tom then heard something similar to arc-welding, a hot electrical burning somewhere in the walls. He rushed to shut off the breakers to the house while his wife dialed 9-11. The first fire-truck arrived within 15 minutes, but that crew said they could not get the pump to turn on. By the time a second crew of firefighters, trucks, and equipment arrived 10 minutes later, the house was fully involved. Over 45,000 gallons of water could not stop the inferno, and the Horn's lost everything inside the house including thousands of pages of documents and research materials into the subject of transhumanism and GRINS technology (genetics, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology), emerging fields of science that Tom believes could, in the hands of transhumanist aspirations, result in the annihilation of mankind.

While Tom Horn's opinion of transhumanism and GRINS may sound daring, he is not alone in his worries. Well-known academics, including the former chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics during the Bush administration, Leon Kass have publicly discussed what they see as serious dangers related to these matters. Bioethicist Wesley Smith, philosopher and political economist Francis Fukuyama, and numerous other persons of name have expressed similar concerns. Fears exist among some pro-transhumanists, too. Professor Hugo de Garis, a famous artificial brain designer and author of The Artilect War sees the death of billions of humans before the end of the 21st Century as a result of GRINS and transhumanism (what de Garis calls "Cosmism").

And then there is the Lifeboat Foundation, whose donors include Google, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and an impressive list of industry and technology executives, including Nobel laureate and Princeton University Prof. Eric Maskin, which speculate how life-altering sciences and modern technology could lead to an extinction level event. The Lifeboat Foundation is currently designing a series of exotic "shields" they hope will defend the human race from near-future dangers posed by GRINS.

According to Horn, top shelf members of the Pentagon and US Intelligence are also not without interest in these fields. They are actively financing top-secret projects into "human enhancement" and terminator-type technology that could lead to real life versions of Splice and Skynet -- the artificially intelligent "Global Digital Defense Network" depicted in the terminator movies that becomes self-aware before turning on mankind.

All of which makes the timing of the catastrophic burn down of Horn's house interesting. Tom and his wife Nita had just published their new book Forbidden Gates before the fire, a 328-page work that seeks to blow the whistle on what the general public is unaware of, i.e. how taxpayer revenue is being funneled into research for "human enhancement as the next step in evolution." As one example among many given in Forbidden Gates, photocopies from Darpa’s Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2011 President’s Budget are provided showing line items that include “editing a soldier’s dna” and, more exotically, millions of dollars for the creation of “BioDesign,” a mysterious artificial life project with military applications in which Darpa plans to eliminate the randomness of natural evolution “by advanced genetic engineering and molecular biology technologies.” The language in this section of the document actually speaks of eliminating “cell death” through creation of “a new generation of regenerative cells that could ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.” In other words, whatever this militarized synthetic life creation is (described as “living, breathing creatures”), the plan is to make it immortal.

No Stranger To Natural . . . And Unnatural . . . Opposition

Horn, a veteran media figure and key apologist in the modern Bible-prophecy movement, has compiled enough detail on some of the powerful contenders who are interested in human enhancement, GRINS and transhumanism to merit serious consideration. Increasingly over the last few years, an eerie volume of personal attacks against him have been displayed by leading names among transhumanist think tanks, the Singularity Institute, even U.S. National Science Foundation Report co-authors who have sought to quiet or discredit his goal of making the public aware of the GRINS/transhumanist agenda.

As an example, not long ago, Carl Teichrib, managing editor of Forcing Change Magazine, a Canadian publication, ran a feature article, The Rise of Techno-Gods: The Merging of Transhumanism and Spirituality. Mr. Teichrib attended and covered the Transhumanism and Spirituality Conference held October 1, 2010, at the University of Utah, and was surprised when Tom Horn was again vilified. Teichrib wrote:

Tom Horn, a Christian researcher who writes and lectures on the dangers of Transhumanism, was mocked as a “Christian whack-job.”

These remarks by Mr. Hughes acted as feedstock for the closing Q&A panel. It started with a question from an online viewer: “Should we seek dialogue with paranoid Christian fundamentalists who rant against H+ [transhumanism], or should we seek more than dialogue, maybe even mock them?”

Hughes responded that he has interviewed Tom Horn, and that Horn has interviewed himself: “I think it’s good to hold our enemies as close as we possibly can.” Then Hughes dropped a bombshell:

“Because apocalyptic and millennial energies very frequently inspire violence… so if reaching out across the aisle to someone who thinks I’m a spawn of Satan, and establishing a relationship so that he doesn’t come after me with gun is something I have to do, I’m willing to do it. Right? And it’s the ones who haven’t reached out yet that I’m worried about.”

[Another leading transhumanist] Max More cut in: “I’m not the spawn of Satan, I’m the spawn of Lucifer!” This comment evoked some laughter, but More was serious. Mr. More wrote in 1991 that,

“Lucifer is the embodiment of reason, of intelligence, of critical thought. He stands against the dogma of God and all other dogmas. He stands for the exploration of new ideas… Join me, join Lucifer, and join Extropy in fighting God and his entropic forces with our minds, our wills and our courage. God’s army is strong, but they are backed by ignorance, fear and cowardice. Reality is fundamentally on our side. Forward into the light!”

If it is true that one is known by the company they keep, transhumanist Luciferian Max More may have unwittingly provided insight into some of the mystery behind the catastrophic fire at the Horn's home as well as a slew of other events during 2010 in which Raiders News Update, the flagship news site owned by the Horn's as well as their online store Survivor Mall and private email accounts were maliciously cyber attacked and hacked on several occasions, always following public commentary by Horn on the dangers of GRINS and transhumanism (watch one of the many youtube presentations by Tom on transhumanism).

But if discouraging or quieting Tom Horn on this subject has been the goal of (visible or invisible) specific powers, transhumanist supporters are in for bad news. Tom has aggressive plans to release a groundbreaking investigative documentary titled INHUMAN: THE NEXT AND FINAL PHASE OF MAN IS HERE, which travels the globe to unveil for the first time how breakthrough advances in science, technology, and philosophy—including cybernetics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, machine intelligence, and synthetic biology—are poised to create mind-boggling game-changes to everything we have known until now about Homo sapiens.

***

Dave Hodges The Common Sense Show (Although we do not agree with everything in this article, we found it interesting to see how people are changing.)

Humanity’s Ultimate Weapon

July 28, 2013

Humanity is presently locked in a pitched battle for survival. Our traditions, our cultures, our health and longevity, our mental health and our spiritual well-being, are gravely threatened by self-serving allies of some very dark forces that we often refer to as Satan. Subsequently, when we reduce the world’s conflicts to the lowest common denominator, what we are left with is a battle between good and evil. And for now, evil is winning hands down.

As John Kennedy pointed out in his, now famous Secret Societies speech, the globalists are well-funded, well equipped and seemingly control everything. Today, we see the manifestation of the dark side and their desire to destroy humanity in the form of fluoride and psychotropic drugs in the water, chemtrails in the sky, GMO’s in our food supply, DNA and RNA alterations, various forms of mind control, exposure to dangerous levels of electromagnetic radiation, the destruction of our oceans and seas through catastrophic events such as Fukushima and the Gulf oil explosion, the continuing fighting of elective wars of global domination which benefit nobody but the bankers which could culminate in an extinction level event called World War III.

While humanity wallows in these multitude of challenges to our survival, the global elite are developing well-documented quantum leaps in life extension technologies through a series of experiments emanating out of a general area which we label as transhumanism. Transhumanism was originally designed as a vehicle to capture and negate the power of the soul. The Frankenstein folklore is a manifestation of these attempts at producing soulless creatures. Having proven unsuccessful in their attempts, the global elite have decided to permanently alter the fundamental structure of humanity in which they hope we lose the connection to our soul which is the well spring of free will and the essence of what we are which is the likeness of God on Earth. Even our popular entertainment media is championing the bifurcation of critical resources between the haves and the have-knots. For example, in the movie, Hunger Games, the ruling elite living in Capital City possessed life enhancing technologies that the rest of the people couldn’t even dream about. In the recent movie, Man of Steel, the birth of who we would come to call, Superman, represented the first live birth in centuries on the mythical planet of Krypton. The movie made it clear that everyone else, on Krypton, for the past several centuries, had been bred for a specific purpose in which to serve the leaders of society in a transhumanist culture where genes were turned on and turned off as it befitted the leadership of the planet to breed people with specific skill sets. In the soon-to-be-released movie Elysium, the elite don’t even live on the earth, as they exist in a disease-free and idyllic world while leaving the bulk of humanity to suffer in universal Third World conditions.

Any researcher who has studied transhumanism, to any degree, recognizes the themes of these popular movies as a representation of where the science is headed.

Additionally, the global elite are moving to control the distribution of all food and all water as well as to remove the essential elements of self-protection from its global citizens in such legislative actions as the United Nations Small Arms Treaty Ban. We are plunging headlong into a nightmarish existence controlled by evil entities with no conscience. These are entities who do not live by the same morals, codes of ethics, laws, and spiritual principles which are imposed on the bulk of humanity in which we now exist in a type of “rules for thee but not for me.”

The elite have attempted to remove God from all secular institutions including our schools as a spiritual attack upon our children. And before you remind me that we live under a constitution which espouses the belief of separation of church and state.

Let me remind you that the founding fathers did not envision a nation in which we had freedom from religion instead of the intended freedom of religion. This was a 1960′s detour which has had catastrophic consequences for the citizens of our time. Since the 1960′s, our country has witnessed continuous war, the murder of 53 million innocent human beings and the spread of unconscionable tyranny and violence to those who would oppose the will of international bankers around the world and we Americans have served as their army of enforcement and compliance. Therefore, by definition, our government and its overall leadership, with some exceptions, should be considered to be evil.

The globalists control all industry and decide to a large extent who gets elected by various means. They control the banks, the corporations and the government and, today, there is virtually no distinction between the three. On the surface, the global elite seems invincible because they have duped humanity into serving them while we fund our own demise through the fruits of our labors.The forces running the planet, mostly made up of unscrupulous, ruthless and satanic international bankers as well as the heads of monolithic corporations, are seemingly hell-bent on implementing their depopulation, eugenics based corporate-fascist domination of humanity. Is there any hope?

There is no hope as long as we use the tools of the evil to fight evil. In other words, the presence of 300 million hand guns in America is a good stop gap provision for self-protection, but it should be considered as an the end goal.

There Is Another Way

As human beings, we have incredible superpowers which would make the superheroes very envious. As I pointed out in part one of this series, we have clear and irrefutable proof of the following:

1. Human beings, beyond the laws of statistical probability, have the ability to anticipate unseen and unheard danger. Research studies in the area of social psychology have demonstrated that people can usually tell when they’re being stared at from behind even when there are no possible sensory cues to tip them off. This ability has obvious implications towards our survivability and, therefore, should be considered to be a natural part of the repertoire that we possess in order to maximize and enhance our prospects for longevity.

2. Human beings, as demonstrated in the “Princeton Eggs” experiments, have the unconscious ability, as manifested in our autonomic nervous system, to anticipate catastrophic danger 3 to 4 hours in advance of the event. Part one demonstrated that on a global scale, the two biggest anticipated dangers as indicated by a spike in autonomic nervous system reactions, were the events of 9/11 and the Tsunami of 2004.

3. Human beings, as demonstrated in a multitude of double-blind research studies, have the ability to affect a physical change in the environment when collective mental processes are utilized in harmony in a phenomena known as mass consciousness. The mass consciousness experiments have been very public and even embraced by popular media figures such as Art Bell.

These three examples which I referenced in part one are only a tip of the iceberg. If you have never heard of these powers, or think they are merely a child’s fantasy, I would encourage you to read part one before proceeding to the following information. I have also included a partial annotated bibliography for your review. Research results on human consciousness may not speak as loudly as the propaganda of the mainstream media, but the results speak the truth much more loudly than our friends do from the corporate controlled media.

The Laws of the Universe

The Supreme Creator fashioned the universe based upon a very consistent and predictable scientific set of processes. As I began to become exposed to some of the good research being done by scientists such as Dean Radin, I was forced to take note of the sophistication of the research data which was highly suggestive of the fact that we, as human beings, possess incredible and seemingly magical powers.

Once I became awake to the conspiracy of the bankers who have hijacked the planet’s governments and economic systems, did I come to view the suppression of human potential as a conspiracy to limit the growth and power of every person on the planet with ultimate enslavement as the goal. Subsequently, as I continue to write various installments in this present series, I wish to point out to all that, (1) these powers can be scientifically demonstrated; (2) each and every human being can harness these powers and collectively utilize these powers for the greater good; and, (3) it is important to bring awareness to the fact that these abilities can only be harnessed to their potential only if they’re being used in the spirit of love, cooperation and equally applied for the benefit of all.

The information being set forth in this series is not proprietary nor secretive. In fact, several have written in depth analyses of these phenomena. However, within the alternative media and the truth movement, I see a large knowledge gap, thereby, creating the need to bring this information out to a different audience.

The Effectiveness of Prayer

Can we pray our way out of the difficulties that we are in now? The answer is both yes and no. If we could awaken humanity to the nature of the threat which imperils all life on this planet, and we could impart the knowledge on how to use prayer as an instrument of defense against these forces, the answer would be yes. However, with the present levels of ignorance on the part of humanity and the lack of knowledge on how to effectively utilize prayer, the answer is a no and we will continue to slide into the abyss of tyrannical enslavement and extermination.

We should all be working to enlighten our fellow man in both areas. The following contains critical information, that if known by the masses would constitute a clear and present danger for the global elite. Let’s begin demonstration of the power of prayer by an examination of the science behind the healing at a distance through the use of prayer.

Healing Prayer at a Distance

We can heal people from long distances using the power of prayer.

The term “distant healing” has actually made its way into the lexicon of the National Institute of Health (NIH). Many medical facilities, including hospitals, referred to this phenomenon by various terms including prayer, spiritual healing and non-local healing. Just within the past few years, two major peer-reviewed journals have published studies on healing at a distance. The Annals of Internal Medicine published a review of 28 double-blind distant healing studies from reputable journals which came to the stunning conclusion that there is enough evidence to support a measurable effect of prayer at a distance and that more research was warranted and needed. Additionally, The Archives of Internal Medicine published a study, which reviewed the health data of 990 cardiac patients who were prayed for in a double-blind study. In this study, the people did not know that they were either being prayed for, or were not being prayed for. Further, in keeping with the tenets of double-blind studies, the people doing the praying did not know the individuals they were praying for. The praying people merely had a list of first names and last initials representing the people that were being prayed for. The survival rate of the group prayed for was significantly and measurably higher than the control group, in which nobody was prayed for.

To the religious zealots who believe that their dogma is the only true dogma, I have disappointing news. The fundamental belief system of the person doing the praying did not seem to alter the results. I do not believe that this negates any one worldview, it simply removes the arrogance from anyone’s worldview! Arrogance and selfishness are the antithesis of this process.

Does experience with praying make a difference in the outcome? It is interesting to note that many of the people in the formal studies used experienced “healers,” while many studies have demonstrated that novices are just as effective. However, there is empirical evidence which suggests that these skills can be taught. Various schools and disciplines (e.g. Reiki, Therapeutic Touch) have collectively produced nearly a half of a million of trained “prayer” practitioners on the skills related to intercessory prayer.

Stunningly, the National Institute of Health is calling for more research to address the question of how to integrate healing at a distance prayers into the practices of mainstream medicine. Dr. Larry Scherwitz, who was the co-director research at the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, has designed guided imagery techniques, not unlike the ones used by athletes, to this end. The goal of these practices is to teach cardiac patients the ability to control blood flow in order to minimize dangerous complications which can occur during surgery. What separates Scherwitz’s approach from the “mainstream” is that he also teaches the techniques to the family members of the patient. Prior to the surgery, the family takes a walk in order to collectivize and unify their intentions. Then, while the patient is asleep on the operating table, the family works with the therapist practicing the guided imagery in which they visualize minimal bleeding, a steady heart rate and a steady hand on the part of the surgeon. They end the session with what is called end-result imagery in which the patient awakens easily, experiencing comfort and is in an alert state. These practices, according to Scherwitz, are adaptable to all types of surgery. This approach to surgery parallels the physics which underlies quantum entanglement which was discussed in part one of this series. The NIH has issued a grant to study healing at a distance.

Two Types of Prayer and When to Use Each

Many readers know that I am not a fan of the modern church. If Jesus were here today, he not only would chase the money changers from our temples, he would also chase the pastors, rabbis and priests from their pulpits for their abrogation of the word of God. There can be no doubt that the church has been totally subverted. Most churches are 501 3 c tax exempt foundations who are compromising their spiritual mission to the will of the IRS. This has resulted in a cowardly church which is afraid to challenge governmental authority even when it violates word of God in such practices as abortion and widespread war resulting in the death of millions of innocent people.

The church should be a beacon of resistance against the encroaching tyranny upon America because the tyranny is satanically inspired and violates every precept of the Bible. But from the pulpits, America’s pastors act as is there is no outside world to worry about and that is because most of them belong to NOVAD which is an organization controlled by DHS designed conscript religious leaders to the government’s side in times of emergency. Don’t serve the recipients of 30 pieces of silver.

The biggest sin in today’s churches is not that they do not stand up and challenge the Satanically inspired tyranny of the government, their biggest sin is that they do not teach their flock how to pray and what type of prayer to use and in what type of situations.

Faith can move mountains. However, the expression of prayer can take two forms and according to the good work of the Spindrift organization, there are two types of prayer:

1. “Goal-directed prayer is conditional prayer. Directed prayer sets up conditions to be met. Conditional prayer constructs borders to follow to arrive at specific results.”

2. “Non goal-directed prayer is unconditional prayer. Unconditional prayer has no borders or biases or conditions to be met. Non directed prayer promotes order and resolution. Non directed prayer creatively changes circumstances in unexpected ways. Creative prayer could create a way where there is no way.“

When I have talked about these concepts to various groups, they often ask which is the best to use? That is not the right question. The proper question is when to use each one and in what situation. So far in this article, we have only see the application of goal-directed prayer (i.e. the healing of specific medical conditions). When praying for the reversal of a dire medical condition, goal-directed prayer is ultimately the only effective approach. However, if one were to pray for our enemies, the globalists (e.g. Rockefeller, Rothschild, Soros, Gore, Obama, etc.), non goal-directed prayer would be best in terms of a “thy will be done” approach. In these types of prayer we are asking for the best possible outcome. When I have prayed about the evils of transhumanism, I do not ask for the abolition of the science. Universal laws are very literal, and the science of transhumanism cannot be defeated with a focused prayer because it is too complicated and diverse. I do not desire to stop legitimate science (e.g. transplants), so we need to be careful what we pray for. Therefore, non goal-directed prayer in which we ask for the best possible outcome would be the wisest choice.

Bruce Klingbeil, the founder of Spindrift, commented about the difference between goal-directed prayer and non goal-directed prayer. He said, “One is the use of will.The other is the release of will.” I would also add a caveat, if in doubt, use non-directed prayer.

Sadly, Bruce and his son were found dead under very mysterious conditions, just like Andrew Breitbart and Michael Hastings. The powers that be do not want this information in your possession. This is why most of humanity is not taught how to pray and what is the true nature of prayer. In our churches, most worshipers simply do a cheap imitation of what their DHS compromised pastors pray for, which is usually for you to be generous with your tax exempt donations to the church. As an aside, any church which serves the IRS over God is not worthy of your spiritual allegiance.

When the two types of prayer are combined with the power of intention, which is actually a subset of goal-directed prayer, mankind can indeed use their faith to move mountains. This notion is explored in a future installment in this series in which I discuss how to use the power of intention which is embedded in goal-directed prayer.

Below, I have included a partial annotated bibliography for your review.

Partial Annotated Bibliography

Bengston, W.F, and Krinsley, D. (2000). The effect of the “laying on of hands” on transplanted breast cancer in mice. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 14 (3):353-364.

Beutler, J. J., Attevelt, J.T.M., et al. (1998). Paranormal healing and hypertension. British Medical Journal, 296. 1491-1494.

Braud, W. (1986). PSI and PNI: Exploring the interface between parapsychology and psychoneuroimmuninology. Parapsychological Review, 17, 1-5.

Braud, W. (1989) Using living targets in psi research. Parapsychological Review, 20, 1-4.

Grad, B. R. (1963). A telekinetic effect on plant growth: I. International Journal of Parapsychology,5 (2):117-134.

Green, W.M.(1993). The Therapeutic Effects of Distant Intercessory Prayer and Patients: Enhanced Positive Expectations on Recovery Rates and Anxiety Levels of Hospitalized Neurosurgical Pituitary Patients: A Double Blind Study , Doctoral dissertation, San Francisco: California Institute of Integral Studies. Vol 54, pg. 2752, UMI NO. AAT9315425

Pleass, C. M., and Dey, D., (1990). Conditions that appear to favor extrasensory interactions between homo sapiens and microbes. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 4, 213- 231.

Radin, D. (1997). The Conscious Universe. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco

Radin, D., Taylor, R. and Braud, W. (1993). Remote mental influence of electrodermal activity: A preliminary replication. In: Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association 36th Annual Convention, The Parapsychological Association, Inc. pp. 12-23.

Resch, KI, Ernst, E., and Garrow, J.(2000). Randomized controlled study of reviewer bias against unconventional therapy. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. 93:164-167.

Sheldrake, R. (1994). Seven Experiments that Could Change the World. London: Fourth Estate.

Spindrift, Inc. (1993). The Spindrift Papers (Century Plaza Building, Spindrift Inc. PO Box 452471, Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33345-2471].

Wiseman, R., and Schlitz, M. (1997). Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring. Journal of Parapsychology, 61:197-208.

***

Yahoo! News

NASA probe hears "shriek" in space as it leaves solar system

A strange, unearthly “shriek” greeted NASA’s Voyager I spacecraft as it became the first man-made object to enter interstellar space.

By Rob Waugh | Yahoo! News–Fri, Sep 13, 2013


NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space as it exited the solar system for the first time.

A strange, unearthly “shriek” greeted NASA’s Voyager I spacecraft as it became the first man-made object to enter interstellar space. 

A strange rising “howl” was detected by instruments aboard the 36-year-old probe, which has travelled 12 billion miles away from our sun.

The sound was transmitted back to scientists on Earth, over a distance so vast radio waves take 17 hours to reach us. Science site iO9 described the sounds as “creepy” and “wraithlike”. 

NASA announced this week that the tiny probe has now left the “solar bubble” - a historic moment which marks our species entry into interstellar space. 

The “howls” and “shrieks” detected by Voyager’s instruments - actually waves in plasma in space - provided proof.

The plasma waves are inaudible in space, but , “These frequencies are within the range heard by human ears,” says NASA. “The soundtrack reproduces the amplitude and frequency of the plasma waves as "heard" by Voyager 1. The waves detected by the instrument antennas can be simply amplified and played through a speaker.”

The rising tones of the “shrieks” of space allowed scientists to realise that Voyager first entered “interstellar plasma” - ionized gas in the space betwen the stars - in August 2012.

“This conclusion is possible from the space craft’s plasma wave instrument,” Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.. “The 36-year old probe is now sailing through uncharted waters of a new cosmic sea and it has brought us along for the journey.”

"Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind's historic leap into interstellar space. The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we've all been asking -- 'Are we there yet?' Yes, we are."

The discovery of the strange sounds - and of the fact that Voyager had entered interstellar space was made possible by an eruption on the sun, which send a burst of “solar wind” towards the tiny craft..

“On April 9, Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the movement,” NASA says. “The pitch of the oscillations helped scientists determine the density of the plasma. The particular oscillations meant the spacecraft was bathed in plasma more than 40 times denser than what they had encountered in the outer layer of the heliosphere. Density of this sort is to be expected in interstellar space.”

The spacecraft launched in 1977, and has travelled billions of miles through our Solar System. It is now so far from Earth that its radio signals take 17 hours to arrive.

Voyager is expected to keep transmitting until 2020.

***

Natural News

The coming plague will not be stopped by drugs: CDC now admits era of antibiotics at an end as bacteria out-wit drug companies

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

Editor of NaturalNews.com (NaturalNews) In a breakthrough moment of truth for the CDC, the agency now openly admits that prescription antibiotics have led to a catastrophic rise in superbugs, causing the death of at least 23,000 Americans each year (an estimate even the CDC calls "conservative").

This is the conclusion of the CDC's new Threat Report 2013, a document that for the first time quantifies the number of fatalities happening in America due to antibiotic-resistant superbugs.

What's truly astonishing about this report is that it admits, in effect, that modern medicine is a failure when it comes to infectious disease. The whole approach of fighting bugs with isolated chemicals was doomed to fail from the start, of course, since Mother Nature adapts to chemical threats far more quickly than drug companies can roll out new chemicals.

Sadly, the very approach of using an isolated chemical to combat disease is rooted in a 1950's mentality that has nearly reached its endpoint in the history of medicine. The CDC all but admits this now, saying the era of antibiotics is nearing its end. "If we are not careful, we will soon be in a post-antibiotic era" - Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC.

The admission should send alarm bells ringing across the medical establishment. Because what it really means is the day isn't too far off when doctors and hospitals can no longer offer treatments for common infections.

Washington’s Blog

The REAL Fukushima Danger

September 15, 2013

The fact that the Fukushima reactors have been leaking huge amounts of radioactive water ever since the 2011 earthquakeis certainly newsworthy. As are the facts that:

Tepco doesn’t know how to stop the leaks

Scientists have no idea where the cores of the nuclear reactors are

Radiation could hit Korea, China and the West Coast of North America fairly hard

But the real problem is that the idiots who caused this mess are probably about to cause a much bigger problem.

Specifically, the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima.

If one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe adverse impacts not only on Japan … but the rest of the world, including the United States. Indeed, a Senator called it a national security concern for the U.S.:

The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen and physician Helen Caldicott have both said that people should evacuate the Northern Hemisphere if one of the Fukushima fuel pools collapses. Gundersen said:

Move south of the equator if that ever happened, I think that’s probably the lesson there.

Former U.N. adviser Akio Matsumura calls removing the radioactive materials from the Fukushima fuel pools “an issue of human survival”.

So the stakes in decommissioning the fuel pools are high, indeed.

But in 2 months, Tepco – the knuckleheads who caused the accident – are going to start doing this very difficult operation on their own.

The New York Times reports:

Thousands of workers and a small fleet of cranes are preparing for one of the latest efforts to avoid a deepening environmental disaster that has China and other neighbors increasingly worried: removing spent fuel rods from the damaged No. 4 reactor building and storing them in a safer place.

The Telegraph notes:

Tom Snitch, a senior professor at the University of Maryland and with more than 30 years’ experience in nuclear issues, said “[Japan officials]need to address the real problems, the spent fuel rods in Unit 4 and the leaking pressure vessels,” he said. “There has been too much work done wiping down walls and duct work in the reactors for any other reason then to do something…. This is a critical global issue and Japan must step up.”

The Japan Times writes:

In November, Tepco plans to begin the delicate operation of removing spent fuel from Reactor No. 4 [with] radiation equivalent to 14,000 times the amount released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb. …. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction. Removing its spent fuel, which contains deadly plutonium, is an urgent task….The consequences could be far more severe than any nuclear accident the world has ever seen. If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire. Any of these situations could lead to massive releases of deadly radionuclides into the atmosphere, putting much of Japan — including Tokyo and Yokohama — and even neighboring countries at serious risk.

CNBC points out:

The radioactive leak at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant is far from under control and could get a lot worse, a nuclear energy expert, who compiles the annual “World Nuclear Industry Status Report” warned.

The big danger – and it was identified by Japan’s atomic energy commission – is if you lose water in one of the spent fuel pools and you get a spent fuel fire.

CNN reports:

[Mycle Schneider, nuclear consultant:] The situation could still get a lot worse. A massive spent fuel fire would likely dwarf the current dimensions of the catastrophe and could exceed the radioactivity releases of Chernobyl dozens of times. First, the pool walls could leak beyond the capacity to deliver cooling water or a reactor building could collapse following one of the hundred of aftershocks. Then, the fuel cladding could ignite spontaneously releasing its entire radioactive inventory.

Reuters notes:

The operator of Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is preparing to remove 400 tons of highly irradiated spent fuel from a damaged reactor building, a dangerous operation that has never been attempted before on this scale.

Containing radiation equivalent to14,000 times the amount released in the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima 68 years ago, more than 1,300 used fuel rod assemblies packed tightly together need to be removed from a building that is vulnerable to collapse, should another large earthquake hit the area.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) is already in a losing battle to stop radioactive water overflowing from another part of the facility, and experts question whether it will be able to pull off the removal of all the assemblies successfully.

“They are going to have difficulty in removing a significant number of the rods,” said Arnie Gundersen, a veteran U.S. nuclear engineer and director of Fairewinds Energy Education, who used to build fuel assemblies.

The operation, beginning this November at the plant’s Reactor No. 4, is fraught with danger, including the possibility of a large release of radiation if a fuel assembly breaks, gets stuck or gets too close to an adjacent bundle, said Gundersen and other nuclear experts.

That could lead to a worse disaster than the March 2011 nuclear crisis at the Fukushima plant, the world’s most serious since Chernobyl in 1986.

No one knows how bad it can get, but independent consultants Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt said recently in their World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013: “Full release from the Unit-4 spent fuel pool, without any containment or control, could cause by far the most serious radiological disaster to date.”

The utility says it recognizes the operation will be difficult but believes it can carry it out safely.

Nonetheless, Tepco inspires little confidence. Sharply criticized for failing to protect the Fukushima plant against natural disasters, its handling of the crisis since then has also been lambasted.

The process will begin in November and Tepco expects to take about a year removing the assemblies, spokesman Yoshikazu Nagai told Reuters by e-mail. It’s just one installment in the decommissioning process for the plant forecast to take about 40 years and cost $11 billion.

Each fuel rod assembly weighs about 300 kilograms (660 pounds) and is 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. There are 1,331 of the spent fuel assemblies and a further 202 unused assemblies are also stored in the pool, Nagai said.

Spent fuel rods also contain plutonium, one of the most toxic substances in the universe, that gets formed during the later stages of a reactor core’s operation.

“There is a risk of an inadvertent criticality if the bundles are distorted and get too close to each other,” Gundersen said.

He was referring to an atomic chain reaction that left unchecked could result in a large release of radiation and heat that the fuel pool cooling system isn’t designed to absorb.

“The problem with a fuel pool criticality is that you can’t stop it. There are no control rods to control it,” Gundersen said. “The spent fuel pool cooling system is designed only to remove decay heat, not heat from an ongoing nuclear reaction.”

The rods are also vulnerable to fire should they be exposed to air, Gundersen said. [The pools have already boiled due to exposure to air.]

Tepco has shored up the building, which may have tilted and was bulging after the explosion, a source of global concern that has been raised in the U.S. Congress.

The fuel assemblies have to be first pulled from the racks they are stored in, then inserted into a heavy steel chamber. This operation takes place under water before the chamber, which shields the radiation pulsating from the rods, can be removed from the pool and lowered to ground level.

The chamber is then transported to the plant’s common storage pool in an undamaged building where the assemblies will be stored.

Tepco confirmed the Reactor No. 4 fuel pool contains debris during an investigation into the chamber earlier this month.

Removing the rods from the pool is a delicate task normally assisted by computers, according to Toshio Kimura, a former Tepco technician, who worked at Fukushima Daiichi for 11 years.

“Previously it was a computer-controlled process that memorized the exact locations of the rods down to the millimeter and now they don’t have that. It has to be done manually so there is a high risk that they will drop and break one of the fuel rods,” Kimura said.

Corrosion from the salt water will have also weakened the building and equipment, he said.

And if an another strong earthquake strikes before the fuel is fully removed that topples the building or punctures the pool and allow the water to drain, a spent fuel fire releasing more radiation than during the initial disaster is possible, threatening about Tokyo 200 kilometers (125 miles) away.

ABC Radio Australia quotes an expert on the situation (at 1:30):

Richard Tanter, expert on nuclear power issues and professor of international relations at the University of Melbourne:

Reactor Unit 4, the one which has a very large amount of stored fuel in its fuel storage pool, that is sinking. According to former prime Minister Kan Naoto, that has sunk some 31 inches in places and it’s not uneven. This is really not surprising given what’s happened in terms of pumping of water, the aftermath of the earthquake and the tsunami, the continuing infusions of water into the groundwater area. This is an immediate problem, and if it is not resolved there is an extraordinary possibility we really could be back at March 2011 again because of the possibility of a fission accident in that spent fuel pond in Unit No. 4.

Xinua writes:

Mitsuhei Murata, a former Japanese ambassador to Switzerland has officially called for the withdrawalof Tokyo’s Olympic bid, due to the worsening crisis at Fukushima, which experts believe is not limited to storage tanks, but also potential cracks in the walls of the spent nuclear fuel pools.

Japan Focus points out:

The spent-fuel pool … was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami, and is in adeteriorating condition. It remains vulnerable to any further shocks, and is also at risk from ground liquefaction.

If a fuel rod is dropped, breaks or becomes entangled while being removed, possible worst case scenarios include a big explosion, a meltdown in the pool, or a large fire.

This is literally a matter of national security – another mistake by TEPCO could have incredibly costly, even fatal, consequences for Japan.

Like Pulling Cigarettes Out of a Crumpled Pack

Fuel rod expert Arnie Gundersen – a nuclear engineer and former senior manager of a nuclear power company which manufactured nuclear fuel rods – recently explained the biggest problem with the fuel rods (at 15:45):

I think they’re belittling the complexity of the task. If you think of a nuclear fuel rack as a pack of cigarettes, if you pull a cigarette straight up it will come out — but these racks have been distorted. Now when they go to pull the cigarette straight out, it’s going to likely break and release radioactive cesium and other gases, xenon and krypton, into the air. I suspect come November, December, January we’re going to hear that the building’s been evacuated, they’ve broke a fuel rod, the fuel rod is off-gassing.

I suspect we’ll have more airborne releases as they try to pull the fuel out. If they pull too hard, they’ll snap the fuel. I think the racks have been distorted, the fuel has overheated — the pool boiled – and the net effect is that it’s likely some of the fuel will be stuck in there for a long, long time.

In another interview, Gundersen provides additional details (at 31:00):

The racks are distorted from the earthquake — oh, by the way, the roof has fallen in, which further distorted the racks.

The net effect is they’ve got the bundles of fuel, the cigarettes in these racks, and as they pull them out, they’re likely to snap a few. When you snap a nuclear fuel rod, that releases radioactivity again, so my guess is, it’s things like krypton-85, which is a gas, cesium will also be released, strontium will be released. They’ll probably have to evacuate the building for a couple of days. They’ll take that radioactive gas and they’ll send it up the stack, up into the air, because xenon can’t be scrubbed, it can’t be cleaned, so they’ll send that radioactive xenon up into the air and purge the building of all the radioactive gases and then go back in and try again.

It’s likely that that problem will exist on more than one bundle. So over the next year or two, it wouldn’t surprise me that either they don’t remove all the fuel because they don’t want to pull too hard, or if they do pull to hard, they’re likely to damage the fuel and cause a radiation leak inside the building. So that’s problem #2 in this process, getting the fuel out of Unit 4 is a top priority I have, but it’s not going to be easy. Tokyo Electric is portraying this as easy. In a normal nuclear reactor, all of this is done with computers. Everything gets pulled perfectly vertically. Well nothing is vertical anymore, the fuel racks are distorted, it’s all going to have to be done manually. The net effect is it’s a really difficult job. It wouldn’t surprise me if they snapped some of the fuel and they can’t remove it.

And Chris Harris – a, former licensed Senior Reactor Operator and engineer – notes that it doesn’t help that a lot of the rods are in very fragile condition:

Although there are a lot of spent fuel assemblies in there which could achieve criticality — there are also 200 new fuel assemblies which have equivalent to a full tank of gas, let’s call it that. Those are the ones most likely to go critical first.

Some pictures that were released recently show that a lot of fuel is damaged, so when they go ahead and put the grapple on it, and they pull it up, it’s going to fall apart. The boreflex has been eaten away; it doesn’t take saltwater very good.

Like Letting a Murderer Perform Brain Surgery On a VIP

What’s the bottom line?

Tepco has an abysmal track record:

Engineers warned Tepco and the Japanese government many years before the accident that the reactors were seismically unsafe … and that an earthquake could wipe them out

The Fukushima reactors were fatally damaged before the tsunami hit … the earthquake took them out even before the tidal wave hit

An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design

Tepco knew right after the 2011 accident that 3 nuclear reactors had lost containment, that the nuclear fuel had “gone missing”, and that there was in fact no real containment at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for 2 and a half years … instead pretending that the reactors were in “cold shutdown”

Tepco just admitted that it’s known for 2 years that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the groundwater and Pacific Ocean

Tepco – with no financial incentive to actually fix things – has only been pretending to clean it up.

Tepco’s recent attempts to solidify the ground under the reactors using chemicals has backfired horribly. And NBC News notes: “[Tepco] is considering freezing the ground around the plant. Essentially building a mile-long ice wall underground, something that’s never been tried before to keep the water out. One scientist I spoke to dismissed this idea as grasping at straws, just more evidence that the power company failed to anticipate this problem … and now cannot solve it.”

Letting Tepco remove the fuel rods is like letting a convicted murderer perform delicate brain surgery on a VIP.

Top scientists and government officials say that Tepco should be removed from all efforts to stabilize Fukushima. An international team of the smartest engineers and scientists should handle this difficult “surgery”.

The stakes are high …

***

The Guardian

David Attenborough says sending food to famine-ridden countries is 'barmy'

Veteran broadcaster has called for a debate on population control

NICK RENAUD-KOMIYA

WEDNESDAY 18 SEPTEMBER 2013

Sir David Attenborough has attacked the idea of sending food aid to countries enduring famine as “barmy” and has urged for more debate about population control, it has been reported.

The natural history broadcaster warned that the world was “heading for disaster” due to the threat of overpopulation, in comments made to the Daily Telegraph.

He said that unless human beings do not act soon the “natural world will do something”.

He added that the natural world has been doing it “for a long time” and more discussion is needed.

Raising the example of Ethiopia, Sir David said that the famine there was down to there being “too many people for too little piece of land”.

Speaking ahead of his new series David Attenborough's Rise of Animals, he suggested that humans are “blinding ourselves” to the problem, claiming, “We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy”.

He cited “huge sensitivities” like the right to have children and the Catholic Church's stance on contraception as barriers to talking about population control.

He added that the issue could also be misconstrued as an attack on poor people as the areas of concern are Africa and Asia.

Discussing comments he made on population control earlier this year, when he described human beings as a “plague on the Earth”, Sir David agreed they could be considered “blindlingly obvious,” but suggested that nobody else had made the point publicly.

“Just keep on about it. Just keep on about it,” he said, when asked by the paper about the next step to solving the problem. “You know and I know that there are huge, huge sensitivities involved in this.

“To start with, it is the individual's great privilege to have children. And who am I to say that you shan't have children? That's one thing.

“Then the next thing is that there's a religious one, in the sense that the Catholic Church doesn't accept this. That you should control the population."

(Proverbs 29:7 - The righteous considereth the cause of the poor: [but] the wicked regardeth not to know [it].

Proverbs 28:27 - He that giveth unto the poor shall not lack: but he that hideth his eyes shall have many a curse.)

***

***

World's Largest Cave

***

Until next week...keep on believing.
Almondtree Productions

“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.”
(Galatians 5:1)